VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, August 5, 2017
East Oregonian
Page 5A
Hundreds of years of harvest
F
or the past couple of weeks, my son
Willie and I have been harvesting
wheat on land we farm in the Helix
area, something my family has done in one
form or another for approximately 130 years.
Some things have not changed
significantly in that time,
but many other aspects of
modern farming would
be unrecognizable to my
great-great-grandfather, who
came to northern Umatilla
County in the 1880s to help
construct the rail line that
connected the newly platted
town of Helix to the line
near present-day Wallula via
tracks laid through Vansycle
Canyon.
After the construction
project was complete, he
decided to stay in the area
and homesteaded land in
1886 that is still owned
by my aunt and uncle.
The railroad was a vital part of the local
economy. It provided a means by which
agricultural products (such as grain and
livestock) could be exported to market and,
conversely, was a means by which imported
goods (such as hardware and lumber, farm
equipment, housewares and thousands of
other items) could be brought to the area.
The rail lines were also the principal
means by which people traveled any distance
more than a few miles. The automobile,
or at least a widely available practical
version, was still decades in the future and
the roads at the time were mostly wagon
trails that were used by the local residents
to pull conveyances that relied upon real
horsepower.
In our modern petroleum-powered
economy it is difficult to fathom the
tremendous amount of work that was
accomplished through the cooperative effort
of man and beast. Horses pulled barges
on the Erie Canal. Draymen, and more
importantly their hardworking four-legged
partners, transported goods in
cities that ranged from heavy
materials used in construction
of early skyscrapers to beer
from breweries. Before the
Industrial Age came to the
Pacific Northwest, an entire
Native culture and trading
network relied upon the
animal whose vernacular
moniker is synonymous with
the tribe who so adroitly
employed them.
Closer to home for me,
my family relied upon horses
(or in later years, mules)
to power all of the tillage,
seeding and harvesting
equipment used on our farm
for two generations. Even for someone so
ostensibly stuck in the past as I am, it’s hard
to imagine breaking into a field of prairie sod
with a single 12- or 14-inch plow behind a
team and at the end of a good day perhaps
an acre and a quarter of land had been
turned. With our 50-year-old tractor and
rod-weeders, we can work up to a quarter-
section (160 acres) a day and yet be scoffed
at by neighbors spraying chemical fallow
with a GPS-equipped sprayer at a rate of 800
acres or more in a good day in the spring.
One aspect of harvesting that would still
strike a familiar chord with great-grandad
is the approximate width of the cutting
apparatus (header) on Willie’s combined
harvester-thresher (combine). Unlike most
of our neighbors, who have expanded to
I wonder if
either of us
could perform
the required
tasks of
the other if
transported to
the future or
to the past.
Choosing how to go
T
he West seems to have a
disease that will kill him. He is
different attitude about life
educated, alert and rational, and right
and death than other parts of
now feels no pain or anxiety because
the country. Of the five states that
a hospice manages his discomfort.
allow medical aid in dying, known
Yet he does not like being tethered
as MAID, four are west of the
to an oxygen line while he slowly
Mississippi — Oregon, Washington,
suffocates. He wants his life to be
California and Colorado. The fifth
over but is too incapacitated to do
is Vermont and, although it is not a
anything about it. At one point he
Rob
state, the District of Columbia.
asked me if I could get him a gun.
Pudim
Other states have come close.
According to the Colorado
Comment
Montana courts have found that
referendum, two physicians have
there is no public policy against
to agree that a person’s medical
assisted death, and New Mexico
condition is incurable and the drug
briefly allowed it in 2014 before overturning
cocktail has to be self-administered. It
it in 2015. In Arizona, the Legislature will
sounds simple.
not let the bill out of committee even though
Nothing is simple.
most Arizonans are said to
What if your doctor has
favor it.
religious beliefs that preclude
Most Westerners, I think,
assisted dying, or has a
believe that allowing people to
literal interpretation of the
obtain medical aid to die is a
Hippocratic Oath, which states
simply a matter of choice that
that before anything else,
should not be a decision made by the state,
do no harm? What if your doctor’s beliefs
a state legislature, a medical association, a
require you to live out whatever life has dealt
religion or any other person.
you? What if the pharmacist thinks the same
Maybe it has to do with the independence
way and refuses to issue the prescription?
of people or geographical distance from each
What if the hospital does not have the
other, or the knowledge that we sometimes
correct protocols in place or the legal
have to depend on only ourselves. A lot of
boilerplate necessary to allow a patient to die
us believe that each person has the right to
by choice? What if the hospital is run by a
decide about our life or death, and whether
church? What if you are physically unable to
life is worth living when a condition is
take the drugs you need to end your life?
incurable and the future filled with pain.
According to Compassion & Choices, a
Granted, we all have the ability to commit national organization that pushed medical
suicide but generally that choice is not
aid in dying in Colorado, 10 prescriptions
pleasant — jumping off Golden Gate Bridge, have been filled so far, but it is not known
guns, death by police or an auto crash.
how many have ever been used. Advocates
If you assist or encourage someone — and say about 1 in 3 patients who receive the
there was a recent controversial case of a
drugs fails to take them. They may have just
young woman encouraging a boyfriend to
wanted the option available.
commit suicide — you can be charged with
My old and dear friend has been facing
being an accessory to murder. Medical
this. He could move to another state and
help in dying, however, is neither suicide
establish residency, which could take at
nor murder, and most cases of a loved one
least six months, or is it a year? He does not
helping another to die are dismissed.
have the time or ability to do this, though
In 1996, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
paradoxically he has a lot of time — to lie in
ruled: “Those who believe strongly that death bed and think about his future.
must come without physician assistance
In Colorado, lawmakers put $44,000
should be allowed to follow that creed,
into the budget in May to help doctors with
whether they be doctors or patients. But they patients who might ask about receiving
should not be free to force their views, their
aid in dying. Republican State Sen. Kevin
religious convictions or their philosophies on Lundberg says tax payers should not support
all other members of a democratic society,
the practice: “This is not the job of a doctor,
nor should they be free to compel those
it’s certainly not the job of he government.”
whose values differ from theirs to die a
Well, whose job is it when you’re stuck in
painful, protracted and agonizing death.”
a bed with tubes and wires attached to you?
Briefly stated, it’s your life. It’s your
And what if this happened to you?
death. It ought to be a personal and private
■
choice.
Rob Pudim is a contributor to High
A dear friend I have known for more
Country News. He says his friend died while
than 50 years has an incurable, progressive
in hospice care on June 16.
It’s your life.
It’s your death.
30 feet and more, we are still at a 20-foot
swath — just like our family’s outfit from
the 1930s. Somewhat similarly to grandpa,
we can harvest about 40 acres a day with the
machine but can now accomplish the task
with a crew of two opposed to four or five
back then. We also have an air-conditioned
cab and power steering; they had goggles, a
neckerchief, the top button fastened, and did
not need to lift weights at the gym to have
powerful biceps.
Grandpa’s outfit from the late 1930s
was pulled not by the great 24-32 head (or
more) teams as had been practiced for a
couple of decades. Instead, it was hitched to
a steel-tracked crawler tractor. Our family
switched to a tractor in 1934 and, just for
good measure and remembrance, we still
own an operable 1933 model that starts with
a hand-crank.
Also in the 1930s, a shift occurred in the
method of handling grain. For years, grain
was sacked either at the stationary thresher
or on the combine on a platform next to a
“sack chute” (we have one of those in the
barn) that would hold five or six sacks of
grain each weighing 120-140 lbs. Sack
piles around the field were then retrieved by
wagons or, later, trucks.
Bulk handling of grain eliminated the
job of sack jig and sewer, but created a need
for wheat truck drivers and scale house
operators at giant elevators where grain
could be stored and shipped to market by
truck, train and eventually barge. Today we
haul grain to giant “ground piles” that will
be tarped before winter and shipped as the
market dictates.
Especially when driving the truck without
a radio, I frequently ponder the similarities
and differences between my “modern”
(we are outdated by about one generation)
farming operation and that of my ancestors.
M att W ood
FROM THE TRACTOR
I wonder if either of us could successfully
perform the required tasks of the other if
transported ahead to the future or back to the
past. I know my great-grandfathers would
have liked to have had access to the crop
insurance I can buy and I wish I had access
to the old-growth, straight-grained lumber
they used to build their barns. For now, none
of that matters. I need to grease the combine
and harvest another 500 acres.
■
Matt Wood is his son’s hired man and his
daughter’s biggest fan. He lives on a farm
near Helix, where he collects antiques and
friends.
Celebrate the unlovely fish
W
esterners, we’ve
especially ones dominated by
got a problem. A
human activity. He does his
trout problem. For
best fishing in reservoirs, below
decades, anglers have fetishized
dams, and along what he dubs
these silvery stream-dwellers,
the Industrial Edge, “ecotones of
maniacally pursuing rainbows,
smokestacks and cinderblocks
browns and brookies to the
and rusty pipes and climbing
neglect of other underwater life.
ivies” where the built and
Every year, obliging fish
natural environments collide.
Ben
managers pump America’s
Goldfarb On Oregon’s Willamette River,
waterways full of millions of
across the channel from railroad
Comment
hatchery-born trout, diluting gene
tracks and homeless camps, he
pools and overwhelming native
lands dinosaur-like sturgeon,
species. We fishermen consider ourselves ancient fish that were swimming Western
enlightened stewards, but our trout
rivers when hominids were a glint in
myopia reveals our true self-centeredness. evolution’s eye.
And let’s not even get started on bass.
Spitzer has a soft spot for invasive
Fortunately, there are plenty more fish
species, too. After netting non-native
in the sea — to say nothing of rivers,
carp, he says, perhaps optimistically,
creeks and lakes. For anyone seeking a
“that we can strike a balance with
deeper understanding of what lies beneath non-indigenous species and incorporate
the surface of Western waterways,
them into our cultures.” Slathered in
“Beautifully Grotesque Fish of the
teriyaki and curry paste, he discovers carp
American West” offers a lively primer
and hideous snakehead fish aren’t half
to the region’s aquatic biodiversity. Over
bad. If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em.
the course of 11 chapters, Mark Spitzer,
Occasionally, the author turns the lens
a writing professor at the University of
inward, to the grotesqueries of his own
Central Arkansas and a certified angling
life. Spitzer makes passing reference to
addict, travels the country seeking the
an acrimonious divorce, the death of his
kinds of experiences that you’re unlikely
mother, and, finally, a new partner. In
to find valorized in the pages of Field &
one passage, landing 6-foot-long gar in
Stream: ice-fishing for burbot in Utah’s
Texas soothes his bitterness about the
Flaming Gorge Reservoir, bounty-hunting dissolution of his marriage, providing a
for pikeminnow in the Columbia River,
redemptive connection to “that youthful
snagging paddlefish in Missouri.
capacity for wondering and marveling at
Spitzer’s shtick is to love the unlovely, what this world has to offer.” During such
moments, you can glimpse the contours
to venerate the homely stalwarts that
of a more personal — and emotionally
make up in resilience what they lack
richer — book lurking just beneath the
in conventional beauty. This is a writer
whose master’s thesis was a novel about a surface: a fisherman’s version of “Wild,”
“misunderstood, man-eating catfish,” and with, say, the Missouri River standing in
for the Pacific Crest Trail. Spitzer angles
whose first two nonfiction books profiled
half the rivers in the West, but he never
the alligator gar, a gargantuan primitive
plumbs his own depths.
fish with a crocodilian smile. You might
What “Beautifully Grotesque Fish”
think that a lifetime of scribbling about
lacks in soul-searching, though, it makes
gruesome freshwater monsters would
up in soul: It’s a paean to the ignored, an
have scratched that particular itch, yet
homage to the uncelebrated. It’s about
Spitzer’s ardor for the ugly is powerful.
embracing the nature we have, whatever
He rhapsodizes about the razorback
it looks like, wherever it swims. There’s
sucker, a “quasi-Quasimodo with an
also plenty of technical advice for
elongated horsey head”; the paddlefish
fishermen hoping to duplicate Spitzer’s
and its “crazy flat spatulated nose”; and
quirky exploits: The best lure on which to
the way American eels swim together in
catch pikeminnow is “either a rubber tube
“spermy formation.” Granted, not all the
fish he targets truly deserve the grotesque or a grub.”
In the end, Spitzer’s book offers a
label: You get the distinct feeling that
fishing manifesto for a human-dominated
he includes a chapter on muskellunge
planet. May trout have company in our
— a sleek, tiger-striped predator that’s
hearts, and on our lines.
gorgeous by anyone’s definition —
■
simply because he yearns to catch one.
Ben Goldfarb is a contributor to High
Just as Spitzer revels in homely fish,
he delights in less-than-scenic landscapes, Country News.